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 were touched. Only one half of England was Puritan or wished to abolish bishops or Prayer Book. Three-fourths of the House of Lords and nearly half the House of Commons were against making any such change; and this at once began to give the King ‘a party’ in the State. He meant to use that party not only to save the Church, but also, if possible, to restore his own ‘strong government’ in civil matters. So things stood in the autumn of 1641; and two events then hurried on the civil war, the King’s visit to Scotland, and a rebellion in Ireland.

Our Parliament-men easily guessed that the King’s visit to Scotland was made in order to see whether, if he had to fight his Parliament, the Scots would help him. For he gave the Scots everything that they asked, and showered honours on their leaders; in fact, he appealed to their old jealousy of England. Still he got little or no promise of help there.

To understand the other thing, the Irish Rebellion, we must go back a long way. No English sovereign before the Tudors had seriously tried to govern Ireland. The kings had often made grants of Irish land to Englishmen, who had then gone over there and had, in a few years, become wilder than the Irish themselves. There was some shadow of English government in Leinster, with a ‘Lord Deputy’ as Governor, and a sort of Irish Parliament; but, in the fifteenth century, the English territory had shrunk to a very narrow district round Dublin called ‘the Pale’. Outside the Pale, it was all broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a thousand years. But Henry VIII had taken the task of government in hand, and had tried to turn the wild Irish chiefs into decent English landowners, who should